Brian De Palma’s novel Are Snakes Necessary? — which opens with a character getting a vasectomy and only gets more sterile from there — was published in France back in 2018 (co-written by Susan Lehman), but has found its way to U.S. bookstores thanks to the Hard Case Crime imprint. Its title references the textbook Henry Fonda reads throughout The Lady Eve (1941), which shows off De Palma’s reverential cinephile credo. Are Snakes Necessary? is a political novel which wraps mysteries within mysteries, mixes real world/fictional disasters and echoes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in numerous ways. When De Palma drops lines like “not the kind of tears women sometimes deploy in emergency situations (when tears are both unstoppable and also useful), but genuine tears,” the line between pulpy and purple prose becomes less distinct than a split diopter shot. It is intended as a lark, as folly. But the experience of reading Are Snakes Necessary? is instructive too, as to the essential intertextuality of cinema, and what constitutes criticism.
Reading Are Snakes Necessary? kept bringing me back to a recent viewing experience of What’s Up, Doc?, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 screwball comedy, in which Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell, a human Bugs Bunny introduced munching a carrot, goes after uptight Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal) at a research conference, causing havoc involving matching briefcases, gangsters, spies and a harpy Madeline Kahn. With a screenplay by Bogdanovich, Robert Benton, David Newman and Buck Henry — who one might conclude is behind the never ending stream of one-liners — What’s Up, Doc? descends from Preston Sturges, much like like De Palma’s equally question-marked Are Snakes Necessary?, but its emulation is not empty homage. By following the letter of the 1930s screwball comedy genre so closely while retaining a then-contemporary 1970s setting, Bogdanovich distances the viewer far enough from the material to illuminate both periods. The clockwork rhythm that defines films like My Man Godfrey and Bringing Up Baby clashes with San Francisco in the early 1970s, defined here by blissed out László Kovács photography and shifting attitudes towards sex. What’s Up, Doc?, in a non-pretentious way, uses the structure of The Screwball to provide a stringent examination of changes in American etiquette, giving it power as an object of its time.
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Much of the same effect is found by reading Bogdanovich’s books on directors, which attempt to illuminate various works through a particularly 1960s worldview. As Justine Peres Smith said in the first entry to this very column, “some of the greatest films in history were extensions of critical writing.” And certainly, What’s Up, Doc? is proof of this. That “extension” reaches beyond the critic turned director, as far as the reader. I am brought nearly to tears when I read George M. Wilson’s Narration in Light (1986), not only because of the precision with which he discusses camera perspective and how the elements of cinema can combine to perform a syntactical on-screen verse, but for how vividly Wilson summons the ghosts of Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, and seems to perform the films as he describes them. When the author describes the characters of Rebel Without a Cause as planets that can’t get sucked too close into each other’s orbit for fear of ending the universe, it’s some of the most hallucinogenic film writing I have come across. After reading criticism like that, does Rebel Without a Cause exist without it?
De Palma’s novel, in ways both practical and figurative, does not exist without his films. It is written like an addendum to his filmmaking, presented in lieu of a new work, as per the quote by Martin Scorsese on the book’s cover, “It’s like having a new De Palma picture.” And what a picture De Palma paints.
“The body of the dead black man lay in a sad and crumpled heap on the street for four full hours after the shooting and neither this nor the fact that the Ferguson police had a history of questionable incidents involving police violence against unarmed black men had contributed much to fellow feeling on the corner of Chambers Road and West Florissant Avenue when Nick arrived, with reporters, that evening. Nick stepped forth into the big, noisy crowd just as police started lobbing tear gas at them.”
De Palma’s use of real-life racial incidents situates Are Snakes Necessary? in a political present, and recalls Hi, Mom’s (1970) subversive mockery of gentrifying white New Yorkers. But it does so with the subtlety of a bucket of paint dropping from the rafters. As with Hi, Mom, De Palma centres the white character in a story that isn’t really his. But where the photographic image might create a stark irony in the depiction of race, it reads as an aside on the page, clumsily grasping at political resonance before returning to the sexploits of his various players. These include Nick, the photographer looking for a missing lover (with shades of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up [1966] and De Palma’s Blow Out [1981]), and Senator Lee Roberts having an affair with Fanny, an 18-year-old intern whose breasts De Palma doesn’t hesitate to describe again and again.
On screen, a scene which De Palma writes as, “Elizabeth stands naked next to the kitchen table drinking Fiji water from the bottle. Nick lies in bed watching her. He likes what he sees and picks up his iPhone and snaps a few pictures,” would be another example of the relationship in his work between looker and subject, and the viewer’s compunction to record and index their fantasies — Antonio Banderas’ sleazy paparazzo in Femme Fatale (2002), John Travolta’s naughty sound guy in Blow Out. On the page, this image loses the essential implication of the viewer in the desire pattern. To read the image is to render it sterile, quite the opposite of the intended effect as De Palma rips through his salacious thriller. For those who consider De Palma a key American filmmaker, to read Are Snakes Necessary? is to ask yourself why.
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I used to believe an intertextual web was the best way to look at film — that by finding each frame of reference in a film, one could definitely unlock the mystery of cinema. I realised how restrictive that viewpoint was when I began to write criticism. It inevitably draws the viewer to celebrate the influence of films like Citizen Kane (1941), La Règle Du Jeu (1939) and Persona (1966). A litany of comparisons is alienating for the reader, who won’t be impressed by how many films one has logged on Letterboxd. It remains satisfying to see how a filmmaker uses other filmmakers to comment on cinema itself. One of the many things that make the films of Paul Schrader so rich, aside from their value as morally dubious artworks, or as Catholic self-flagellation, is their expression of a history of film. From Taxi Driver (1976) to Hardcore (1979) to First Reformed (2017), Schrader provides meditations on the rescuing theme of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), where a man travels in disgust through the underbelly of modern society to rescue a pure innocent, and finds her corrupted by that other force which he hated. Manny Farber called this a “glumly humorous, elephantine, Melville-type spoof of a movie pattern,” which may be true, but Schrader’s repetition of this theme and storyline provides divergent angles on his own work, which change as he ages. This culminates in First Reformed with an old man’s paranoia over the future of mankind. Significantly, Schrader uses that film to put into practice the formal map he outlined in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972). One doesn’t need to enter the intertextual matrix to be moved by First Reformed, but the film’s combination of elements of Winter Light (1963), Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Ordet (1955) provides a deconstruction of “transcendental” filmmakers’ work, as well as reaching closer to the essence of Schrader as an artist. If the point of criticism is to bring the reader closer to the artwork, then Schrader’s reviews of other films are as important as his own to understanding his perspective.
When Farber and Patricia Paterson call Taxi Driver “a Tale of Two Cities: the old Hollywood and the new Paris of Bresson-Rivette-Godard,” they could be talking about any number of De Palma films. For all that he directly references Alfred Hitchcock, his films are equally anxious about the post-industrial urban sprawl. That tension is gone in Are Snakes Necessary?, but the experience of reading it nonetheless operates as an act of criticism. To make it through the book is to relive De Palma from early makeshift satires like Hi, Mom to his most satisfying period in the late 70s and early 80s — where his thrillers combined so many aesthetic and political references that what they regurgitated was a kaleidoscopic reflection of their moment — and then to his confused political commentaries in films like Redacted (2007) and Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Significantly, Are Snakes Necessary? will pair with De Palma’s last feature, Domino (2018), an aggressive film with much to say about 21st century surveillance culture, hidden deep within an unfinished work (he didn’t even complete shooting) that plays like a DTV sideshow. It’s barely watchable, and for the De Palma devotee, the wound is torn open. Are Snakes Necessary? is the salt.
To watch a De Palma film is to have cinema, in all caps, thrown into your face. For better or worse, his maximalist cinema exposes the essence of Hollywood filmmaking. De Palma’s prose is ill equipped to do the same for fiction or for film. He uses the phrase “cool-as-a-cucumber” more than once. But in its lack, one finds the very things that capture the essence of De Palma. Of course, the irony isn’t lost when Nick, the character stand-in for the man who reinterpreted Vertigo a dozen which ways, responds to news of a Vertigo remake with, “What a great idea, remake one of the most revered pictures in cinema history.” As much as Bogdanovich’s faculties as a film historian and Schrader’s past as a critic render them apt to put their theses on screen, De Palma’s Are Snakes Necessary? functions in the opposite, as a document that supports his other films, as a piece of self-criticism, even when he’s not being self-critical. It’s true what they say: these days, everyone’s a critic.
Ben Flanagan (@manlikeflan) is a film critic and programmer based in London.